Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Delight Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

mateoxx59 Finally KGB colonel Mihalkov shows his real face !In this awful movie, we see a good (!?!?) Bolshevik colonel, in... 1936 !Since 1933 till 1936, only in Ukraine, more than THREE MILLIONS died by starvation, because of these 'good' or bad Bolsheviks ! How many of the Russian elite died in the so called 'revolution' and the years that follows ? Ten millions ? 15 ? 20 millions ?How many Baltics, Moldavians, Caucasians or central Asia people died in Siberia camps, Ural or Arctic mines ? How many hundreds thousands of land workers, engineers, teachers, lawyers ?All the high Bolsheviks were bloody criminals, without exception, starting with Lenin, Trotski or Stalin.See also their children: Mao, Kim Ir Sen, Fidel, Ceausescu, Enver Hodja, Pol Pot etc etc.Try 2 serious movies about the reds: Soviet Story, 2008 or Katyn, 2007.

tomb_92 I'd never actually seen an Academy Award Best Foreign Language winner until I saw this and my hopes were pretty high. I have to say I was a little disappointed. Firstly, the film was beautiful to watch. The locations really showed off the sheer beauty of Russia (I presume it was shot in Russia, and secondly the whole thing really did feel like a piece of art- carefully crafted and lovingly put together. I applaud the making of. However, the acting quality was inconsistent. Mikhalkov was very good at the lovable "uncle Jo" figure. Every moment he was on screen his presence felt commanding despite the kind jolly figure he played. I think that Oleg Menshikov stole the show. His portrayal of a bitter, vengeful man started off very subtle until he built it into something of a madman at the end, was brilliant. Mikhalkova was also wonderful to watch as the young girl, innocent and sweet, yet curious and smart. I do feel that some of the supporting cast were a little pointless, a few of them need not have been there perhaps, it added to the confusion of the film. Next, the story was really gripping, once it got going. I have no problem with a film starting slow and moving and a slow pace but this film of just over 2 hours felt like well over 2 and a half. I did thing the story was really interesting and once I got into it I really did feel the terror of Stalin's brutal regime. It was also an interesting film morally, I constantly felt myself drawn between the two main characters, not sure who to root for, which I felt was wrong because it was kind of obvious, I felt, who was supposed to be the villain. The ending also felt a little odd. With all of the build up that finally got going I felt that the ending was too underwhelming. I felt a little let down, I kind of got the message about Stalin but I felt that after all the build up it kind of didn't go anywhere. It was still a really good film and well worth watching for the performance of the leads and the scenery.

G K That rarity: Burnt By The Sun is a film that feels as if the people who made it lived through the period it describes. During an idyllic summer in the mid-1930s Russia, a flamboyant colonel's (Nikita Mikhalkov) household is thrown into turmoil by the arrival of a figure from the past.The ugly betrayals of the Stalin era are documented in as pretty and lulling as any picture to have emerged from Russia in recent times; an advanced degree of historical and political scholarship may be required to grasp all the film's resonances. Burnt By The Sun received the Grand Prize at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, among many other honours.

koluka2 The events shown in the movie are true. Those who are not Russian i.e. do not live in Russia and do not know the subject well, may rate this movie highly. Let them do this, it's not their fault. They do not know the subject well and anything about the movie director and the environment he was brought up in. They do not know anything of the family that he was born in and brought up as well. All his "masterpieces" created after the Perestroika are 100% show off and conjuncture and considered for the European/American audience; however this fact is clear to mostly Russian audience only. Hopefully, this will be recognized by everybody in the world one day.